Jan. 18 (Bloomberg) -- At the Wolf Conservation Center in
South Salem, New York, a wood stove heats a cottage whose sole
occupant, photographer and co-founder J Henry Fair, chucks a log
on the fire as he holds forth on U.S. environmental policy.

With two new exhibitions in New York and a book coming out
next month, it’s a busy time for Fair. The day I visit, he is
making frames for his prints in the shows with wood milled from
local trees he felled.

The center, about 75 minutes’ drive north of Manhattan,
provides education on wolves and the environment. Working with
the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, it breeds endangered wolves
and helps reintroduce them into the wild.

Adorning the cottage’s walls and work table are samples of
Fair’s work, brilliant photographs of environmental nightmares.

For the past 20 years or so, Fair has been shooting
industrial sites such as mountaintop mines in West Virginia and
petrochemical plants along the Mississippi River’s “Cancer
Alley,” a stretch of Louisiana from Baton Rouge to New Orleans
with high incidences of the disease. A photo of a smoldering
plastics factory looks like something out of Dante’s Inferno.

“It’s funny, I’ve been putting this together for 20
years,” he says. “Much of it seemed unrelated, and it’s now
coming together.”

Toxic River

These aren’t just pretty pictures of horrible things. The
images -- usually aerial shots -- are an education in
environmental impacts, the otherwise unseen costs of modern
living.

He shows me a stunning bird’s-eye view of a white toxic
river spewing from a battered coastline into a brown-red sea.
“I didn’t know what that was when I took it,” he says of the
scene captured over Baton Rouge a few months after Hurricane
Katrina.

Later he learned it was the byproducts of bauxite refining,
used in the manufacture of aluminum, coursing into the Gulf of
Mexico.

“What’s so interesting about this stuff is the abstract
beauty,” says Fair.

I find myself looking closely at each print wondering: What
the hell is that? Which is good, says Fair, since he wants,
above all, for people to ask questions. “I realized that the
more abstract the images became, the more interesting they
were.” It’s true.

“The other side of this stuff,” he explains, “are these
very mechanistic images: the giant excavators chewing earth,
which are pretty amazing, and the drill rigs spitting fire over
the Gulf of Mexico.”

Abstraction, Information

The two aspects of his work require two distinct
exhibitions. The show of artsy abstractions opened Jan. 13 at
the Gerald Peters Gallery on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The
show at Cooper Union from Jan. 20 “will be very informational
and, image-wise, more Charles Sheeler, a little more
mechanistic.”

The photographs at Cooper Union will be given context with
information from such sources as the Environmental Protection
Agency’s Toxic Release Inventory. It will also include practical
information for consumers.

Fair’s first book, “The Day After Tomorrow: Images of Our
Earth in Crisis,” features his dramatic aerial photographs with
essays by prominent scientists, authors and activists, such as
James Hansen, Jack Hitt and Frances Mayes.

Fair can identify specific industrial villains in his work,
yet he prefers not to name names. He doesn’t want to simply list
brands to avoid, since some people will think a boycott is
enough “activism” and stop asking questions. (I note, though,
that one of his pieces is titled “Claws of Brawny,” depicting
the paper-towel manufacturer’s brutal tree-pulping operation.)

Change in Canada

He will cite good-citizen companies, such as Kimberly-Clark
Corp., maker of Kleenex and other paper products. A couple of
years ago, Fair photographed the manufacturer’s atrocious
culling of old-growth forests in Canada for the Natural
Resources Defense Council which, with Greenpeace, had launched a
campaign against the company. The pressure must have got to
Kimberly-Clark, because in 2009 it agreed to stop messing with
Canada’s old-growth forests.

“And the beauty of this story,” says Fair, “is the
success of consumer pressure to have a producer do the right
thing, all of which starts with citizen awareness.”

At some point, Fair wants to fly over Iceland to photograph
the aluminum industry’s impact on the wilderness. He’d like to
figure out a way to shoot the giant vortex of garbage swirling
around the northern Pacific. If anybody can make such things
beautiful, it’s this guy.

“J Henry Fair: Abstraction of Destruction” is showing
through Feb. 11 at the Gerald Peters Gallery, 24 E. 78th St.
“Landscapes of Abstraction” opens Jan. 20 at the Cooper Union
School of Art, 41 Cooper Square. The photo sizes are 20” by 30,”
30” by 40” and 50” x 70,” with an edition of 10 for each size.
The prices range from $2,550 to $6,000. “The Day After
Tomorrow” will be published by PowerHouse Books.

(Mike Di Paola writes on preservation and the environment
for Muse, the arts and culture section of Bloomberg News. The
opinions expressed are his own.)